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... the habit of literature [is] the best defense against believing the half-truths of ideologues and the lies of demagogues.
Ursula K. Le Guin
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Ursula K. Le Guin
Age: 88 †
Born: 1929
Born: October 21
Died: 2018
Died: January 22
Author
Feminist
Journalist
Literary Critic
Novelist
Poet
Prosaist
Science Fiction Writer
Screenwriter
Translator
Writer
Berkeley
California
Ursula Kroeber
Ursula Kroeber Le Guin
Defense
Lies
Habit
Literature
Lying
Demagogues
Half
Ideologues
Best
Truths
Believe
Believing
More quotes by Ursula K. Le Guin
There are two kinds of knowledge, local and universal.
Ursula K. Le Guin
If a book told you something when you were fifteen, it will tell you it again when you're fifty, though you may understand it so differently that it seems you're reading a whole new book.
Ursula K. Le Guin
First sentences are doors to worlds.
Ursula K. Le Guin
To claim power over what you do not understand is not wise, nor is the end of it likely to be good.
Ursula K. Le Guin
When we're done with it, we may find—if it's a good novel—that we're a bit different from what we were before we read it, that we have been changed a little, as if by having meet a new face, crossed a street we've never crossed before.
Ursula K. Le Guin
If civilization has an opposite, it is war. Of these two things, you have either one, or the other. Not both.
Ursula K. Le Guin
The one thing a writer has to have is a pencil and some paper. That's enough, so long as she knows that she and she alone is in charge of that pencil, and responsible, she and she alone, for what it writes on that paper.
Ursula K. Le Guin
He knew now, and the knowledge was hard, that his task had never been to undo what he had done, but to finish what he had begun.
Ursula K. Le Guin
Success is somebody else's failure. Success is the American Dream we can keep dreaming because most people in most places, including thirty million of ourselves, live wide awake in the terrible reality of poverty.
Ursula K. Le Guin
Belief is the wound that knowledge heals.
Ursula K. Le Guin
If you want to know all about the sea ... and ask the sea itself, what does it say? Grumble grumble swish swish. It is too busy being itself to know anything about itself.
Ursula K. Le Guin
Morality is an utterly meaningless term unless defined as the good one does to others, the fulfilling of one's function in the sociopolitical whole.
Ursula K. Le Guin
The only questions that really matter are the ones you ask yourself.
Ursula K. Le Guin
Sleeping people are so remote.... Right here, but out of communication. That's what strikes humans as uncanny about sleep. Its utter privacy. The sleeper turns his back on everyone.
Ursula K. Le Guin
You fear them because you fear death, and rightly: for death is terrible and must be feared,' the mage said...'And life is also a terrible thing,' Ged said, 'and must be feared and praised.
Ursula K. Le Guin
What is more arrogant than honesty?
Ursula K. Le Guin
I gather that a lot of the pots in the great museum in Baghdad, which we allowed to be looted and then gutted, are now for sale to the highest bidder on the art and archeology black market. This is good capitalism, I guess, while a museum, being a public trust and accessible to all, is anticapitalist, pretty damn near socialist in fact.
Ursula K. Le Guin
The backside of heroism is often rather sad women and servants know that. They know also that the heroism may be no less real for that. But achievement is smaller than men think. What is large is the sky, the earth, the sea, the soul.
Ursula K. Le Guin
To read and to write. Some writers have to be told to write. They think their job is to meet agents and have experiences and they can just be rich and famous. Their job is to write. Some really don't realize that. And you can't write unless you read.
Ursula K. Le Guin
A writer is a person who cares what words mean, what they say, how they say it... By using words well they strengthen their souls.
Ursula K. Le Guin